07/20/2010

Hot Tamales Sugar Free Cinnamon Gum

When I saw this gum at Walgreen's, I knew I couldn't pass it up. I'm working on a bunch of chewing gum reviews, so I knew this would fit perfectly as a "novelty" gum. It's not a gum you chew every day, but it's always fun to throw something like this into the review mix. I recently reviewed Hot Tamales and still had a few of them sitting around, so I could get a great comparison going on this gum versus the classic Hot Tamales candy.

You can see in the picture below how this gum, which is on the top in the picture, compares to regular Hot Tamales. The color is about the same, but the gum is darker, sort of like the Hot Tamales Fire. It's also square instead of round, which is really odd. It looks more like those square pieces of peppermint you see at Christmastime than the normal Hot Tamales shape.

When you put a few pieces in your mouth, it takes a few seconds for the flavor to kick in. Once it kicks in though, woweeeeeeeeee, it's like the Hot Tamales Fire. I had to be careful because after trying this gum several times, I had the same problem I had with the Hot Tamales Fire, the cinnamon flavor was too much for my throat to handle and I went into coughing spells. I didn't mind it, but that's because I love cinnamon flavored candy and gum. For some people, this might not be what you are looking for. However, after the initial hot hot cinnamon flavor, the game starts to taste more like Big Red gum, with a very nice cinnamon flavor. I timed the flavor and it lasted for around 5 minutes. Again, this is novelty gum and that's what you can expect. This gum is horrible for blowing bubbles. It's really only good for an intense blast of cinnamon flavor that tapers to a nice cinnamon flavor that tapers off to normal gum that gets really hard to chew after a bit of time. I liked the gum, but found the bag to be pretty annoying. With regular candy you buy in a bag, you might eat it all within a few hours or days, but I can't eat 50 pieces of gum in that time. So how do I store this? Also, where do I keep this gum? You can't keep it in a purse or backpack, it would go everywhere unless you wrapped a rubber band around it. I don't think the packaging was well thought out. This is fun for a change of pace. Walgreen's seems to always have this in stock, you should try it out.